Have you tried Nintendo’s amiibo tap: Nintendo’s Greatest Bits yet? It’s a Wii U app released on April 30, 2015 designed to add another function to the few amiibos you’ve managed to pry out of the hands of crying children and scalpers. The idea is simple. Tap an amiibo to the Wii U Gamepad’s NFC reader. It will then randomly unlock a game, with multiple “scenes” that you test for three minutes. It’s not the best thing ever.
The random nature of amiibo tap gets things off to a discouraging start. You never know what you’ll get. See that official screenshot from Nintendo up there at the top of this article? In that demonstration, Pikachu unlocked Super Metroid . Do you know what Pikachu unlocked in my game? Kirby Super Star . Pit gave me The Legend of Zelda , Marth had Super Mario Bros. , my Villager was tied to Super Mario Bros. 3 , and the Wii Fit Trainer came with Kirby’s Adventure .
But back to Pikachu and Kirby Super Star . This demo had 10 scenes to play. I would get three minutes with each scene. Pausing during said scene wasn’t a smart idea, as the counter continued to tick down. Three minutes isn’t enough time to determine the value of a game. Even though I was able to complete the first scene, a few areas leading up to a boss battle against Whispy Woods, and am familiar with the game, I don’t think I’d ever purchase any game based on a few minutes of gameplay. Perhaps the only positive is knowing time refills if the amiibo is tapped to the Gamepad to switch scenes.
There’s another element of impracticality to amiibo tap: Nintendo’s Greatest Bits . You always need the amiibo on hand. The game constantly shows which Virtual Console demos you’ve unlocked, scrolling along the bottom of the start screen, but you can’t tap a demo you’ve already earned to jump into it again. You have to grab the amiibo and tap it every time you want to play. It’s annoying, especially if you typically have the figures displayed somewhere.
Worse, amiibo tap: Nintendo’s Greatest Bits acts as a callback. Nintendo has problems with demos. The 3DS samples are a good example. You get a limited number of tries to test out a game, at which point the demo locks you out. Yes, the number of tries is rather liberal, but the idea that a usage limit is applied is rather unwelcoming.
Now, amiibo tap: Nintendo’s Greatest Bits is doing something similar. Rather than welcoming someone in and making it easy to enjoy a few levels or areas from a Virtual Console game, walls are constructed around the games. While this does mean you aren’t locked out of one of the 31 demos if you can’t find a specific amiibo, it does feel like a convoluted way of allowing people to see if one of these old NES or SNES games is as magic as they remember.